Cuckolded and Buried Alive

Nights 846-863

This week is another fairly light story. A man pursues a married girl. We are meant to forgive them as they start an affair, since they are not Muslims when it begins. The story starts well enough, with the man trying to win her over by defeating her in chess. But then it goes off the rails a bit: we already knew that she was petite (“between four and five foot tall” (p. 294, Night 846)); next we find out that she is only fourteen years old (p. 305, Night 850). The man recites an overly graphic poem about her (p. 309, Night 851). And it’s not just him. Later, the qadis that she meets fall so deeply in love with her beauty that some of them kill themselves. The monks think she is so beautiful that they “keep a picture of [her] in the monastery . . . until they [are] visited by the destroyer of delights.” (p. 337, Night 862). 

I don’t always comment on the anti-Semitism in the Nights, but this story is especially egregious. We are meant to cheer for the girl as she tries to escape from her husband, whom she calls “the Jew.” When she finally escapes him, and we’ve basically already had our happy ending, he returns in an epilogue. After the girl learns he has found her, she asks her slave girl Hubub to “find some way of burying him alive” (p. 340, Night 863). When the Jew learns that he has lost her for good, he recites a poem, weeps, wails, and falls unconscious. This is Hubub’s chance. While he is “still alive but in a bemused state,” he is “dragged off” and put “into the grave.” Hubub fills up the grave and brings the news to her mistress, who is “overjoyed.” It’s a pretty gruesome fate for someone whose only real fault was that he was Jewish. The story really could have ended a page or two earlier with the lovers’ happy ending; we didn’t need the excessive cruelty.